Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in Chief of Current Affairs Magazine. I am joined today by John Gassvinian. He is executive director of the Middle East Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is also the founding director of scholars to storytellers. He is, finally, the author of

the acclaimed book, America and Iran, A History, 1722 to the present. John Gersvinian, welcome to Current Affairs.

Thank you very much.

So I've been diving into your book over the last couple of weeks, and I feel like

there are revelations on every other page or things that I think that, or if not revelations,

things that I think the 99.7% of people in the United States

don't know about Iran in this book. And it just emphasizes over and over to me that the

overwhelming impression that was left was how little the average person in

this country knows about Iran and knows about US relations with Iran.

And I want to start with a story that they might get through the press.

A message their understanding of Iran might be as an oppressive

theocracy whose leaders hate America vowed to destroy Israel. A country that's a role in the world

is so chaos to the use of proxy militias, and a country, moreover, that is a threat to the region,

because it is in constant pursuit of nuclear weapons.

It has even been described, and they will have heard, Americans will have heard, as part of an axis of evil.

When you hear someone give this kind of conventional picture of Iran as a global menace, where do you start to untangle that?

Well, I mean, first of all, I think it's worth acknowledging that a lot of the labels like that

don't come out of nowhere, that the Iranian government's behavior is far from benevolent.

But I think that what you're getting out with your question is, you know, that we do have

a very sort of cookie cutter, or I should say, sort of like simplistic image of Iran that

is sometimes painted, a very kind of black and white image.

Of course, as all countries around the world, Iran is not painted, or should not just be painted in black and white.

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